Babel
The story goes, once we all had a common language and spoke the same mother tongue and all was harmony. The people said to themselves let us make a tower so we can be as tall as God and maybe we can be as great as he is or greater, and so they built together, gathering materials, and they made it strong and they made it high.

Stained glass windows, columns of pure gold, mosaics of turquoise and cobalt, staircases of marble, it was a marvel to behold, nothing compared either before or after the skill and craft that went in to the tower of Babel. They reached as high as the first layer of cumulus and the atmosphere started to get thin and become cold. They were wondering how to continue.

But God reached in his basket and pulled out coloured birds by the handful and threw them up free into to air, each one different and varied, each one with a different song. The birds flew down to the builders of the tower, like a rainbow shower. The birds sang so beautifully, so loud that the workers could not hear each other speak.

The highest scaffolder turned to a brickie and said, what is this marvel? But the brickie could not understand him, what did you say? He asked the scaffolder looked baffled he didn’t understand a word. And so with the lack of understanding and language, building work stopped. The pointers, chippies, sparkies, roofers, plasterers all got down from their places on the scaffolding mystified and went back home, and the tower was never finished and that is why we love a ruin and why we speak in different languages and tongues.


ink drawings by Frances Norton 2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Collect Art Publication July 2023

Image
 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine cotton Lawn.   Flower tortu
Read more

Five Pandemic Poems

Image
 Five Pandemic Poems 1. Solitary 2. At the bird sanctuary 3. Writing practice 4. Closing the chapter 5. Icon eyes                                              Image from Unsplash Open Source. 1.  Solitary  I could be a fifty-three-year-old woman. Living post-cancer. In a world where cancer is suddenly not the biggest, baddest virus on the Block. All the emotions I dealt with about a growing death within me. Harbouring an enemy in my breast. My habits during illness of self-imposed quiet, solitary days. The lore of stay home, stay safe. Now everyone experiences this in the time of lockdown, in a pandemic.                                              Blackbird Rainbow, by Frances Ann Norton 2.  At the bird sanctuary Its so hard growing up, my beautiful brave girl. The moment you were put into my arms after a long labour I knew you were a fighter, an old soul, determined and singular. You withstand your greatest health burden with magnanimity, dignity and stoic
Read more
Image
  https://www.haus-a-rest.com/new-page-72 Fantastic to have two poem selected for the Haus-A-Rest zine issue 39. Artschool and what it did or did not tell you.  The Ontological Art School and What I Learned There In a game of solitaire, I am dealt a number of random cards – these are my social locators. Where and when I was born and my parents, these things are out of my control. Just like the cards I have been dealt. Knowing and understanding my locators is like playing a game strategy. Making the best use of the cards I have. This is my ontology of the art school. My parents met at post-war art school in the 1940s. Their evenings were filled with philosophical and art theory discussions at the jazz clubs. The ontological context of the art school for me was in the wider community too. My sister and I grew in a network of artists, musicians, poets and designers. I thought everyone lived like this. We I spent our chodhood in the corridors and classrooms of the loc
Read more